If These Walls Had Ears Read online

  The kitchen is warmest at 11:30 in the morning, when the sun finds the windows and cuts across the pine table like a Hopper painting. My office catches an intriguing sliver of west sun late in the day, after 4:00 RM. It beams in through the French doors and warms the wall over my oil paints, turning it golden.

  I also know the time of day whose light I like least. I adjust the living room miniblinds slightly upward at 6:30 on summer evenings, especially if we’re having someone over. Otherwise, the sun’s rays will spray the floor and wall and dining room mirror, ricocheting through the room like a drive-by shooting. Such an onslaught inevitably exposes a thin film of dust no matter how often we vacuum—on the hardwood floors between the dining room and hall.

  Since I’ve been writing this book, I’ve become especially conscious of my feelings about light. I like rooms moody, indirect. I like candles on the dinner table. I don’t like track lights, though we have a vestigial row of the things left on our living room ceiling, a legacy of the Burneys. I don’t know what I was thinking.

  Mainly, I don’t like a spotlight on me. Now it occurs that I should’ve thought of that before I started writing this book.

  When I began, I had no idea how much my illuminating the secrets of my house might also require spotlighting secrets of my own. If our houses are us, then we are our houses. Now I find I’m obliged—by the saga of which I’m a part—to reveal glimpses of my own faulty wiring, cracks in my own foundation.

  It’s easier just to shut the blinds.

  But I began this story as a search, and much of that search had to do with me. I suppose I’ll survive the glare. We’re all houses. We all have our histories and secrets, our losses, our damaged hearts. No wonder we don’t like looking into the black broken places inside our closets. No wonder we cringe at the thought of crawl spaces, or feel a chill about dank basements or skeletal attics. We go through our lives not knowing those we love, the places we live in, or even ourselves. We stand, separately, row after row of us on street after street all over the world—all houses. But in spite of ourselves, we yearn to be homes.

  Beth and I came to 501 holly packing separate pasts, looking for a house understanding enough to accommodate those and our uncertain future, too.

  For me, the handful of days that led up to Holly Street were the pivotal moments in my life to that point, both personally and professionally. By that I mean, I actually made a conscious decision on both fronts. I know how ridiculous that sounds. I also know that well-adjusted, mature people who don’t confuse themselves with a rich inner life probably won’t understand. But since I’d always lived most satisfyingly inside my head, I’d made conscious decisions only about my work. The personal side, in a way, had just come along for the ride. I’d allowed decisions to be made for me, or allowed time to take its course. This includes the subject of marriage, which goes a long way toward explaining why I now have two ex-wives.

  At the end of August 1989, after our magazine had been sold and our staff replaced, I turned down an offer for the top job at a big-city magazine—consciously deciding to step off base as a day-to-day, salary-drawing magazine editor and instead to accept a part-time consulting deal so I could write. I called an old boss of mine, and he told me, “The only risks I’ve ever regretted were the ones I didn’t take.” The ramifications were frightening but exhilarating. They became even more adrenaline-producing when you added my decision, one day later, to ask Beth to marry me. My plan was for us to stay in Arkansas and write, to live together and work at home. She accepted, and the next morning I called my Realtor to look for a house.

  I believe Beth made a measured decision, too. She’s endured much pain in her life. Her father was killed when she was fifteen, and in many ways her family splintered after that. Right after college, she married her first husband—one of a brood of ten children—trying to find a family to fit into. A home. She learned, of course, that home isn’t a quantitative thing. just before she and I met, she’d been told that her beloved brother and ally Brent, an interior decorator in New York, had been diagnosed with HIV. That had been the most devastating blow of all.

  I first saw her in 1986, at a meeting for the new magazine we were starting in Little Rock. A writer, she had come to hear some of us talk about staffing and other subjects. I spotted her in the crowd. She looked like someone who had peered into the black broken places. As I watched her that day, I thought of a New Yorker cartoon that had always amused me about my own well-known moodiness. I’d kept it pinned to my office wall for the longest time; then I moved again, of course, and lost it. It showed a man and woman at one of those trendy Manhattan parties. In the background, you could see that the apartment was abuzz with smart talk. In the foreground, however, a young man sat alone on the terrace. A woman had just approached him. “You’re not having much fun, are you?” she said. “I like that in a man.”

  Beth didn’t seem to be having much fun.

  I was right about her and I was wrong. Wrong, in that she has a relentless spirit, an irrepressible fun about her that won’t be quashed. This is the woman who introduced me to martinis. But I was right about her, too. It would be a long time before she and I married, but the sadness I saw in her that day would color our first three years on Holly Street.

  * * *

  Like the Burneys, we moved in three weeks before our wedding. We asked for and received special dispensation from Beth’s ex to let his young daughters sleep under the same roof with a man and woman who were living in sin.

  Blair was eight, Bret five when we came to Holly Street. I remember the day we brought the girls over to see the house for the first time. We’d decided that Bret would have the smaller room at the top of the stairs, and Blair the larger bedroom adjoining. Both girls were aghast when they saw the fabric walls in Blair’s room and the two baths. I told the girls that’s how I had known this was the perfect house for our crazy new family—the place came complete with padded walls.

  I decided that if Beth and I didn’t call off the wedding in those first few weeks, we would have no problem lasting forever. We’d tried to get the painters scheduled before we moved in, but the Burneys were already being pressed. Looking over my house file six years later, I almost get sick summoning back that frantic time. I’ve never enjoyed the business of buying a house. I don’t know how you buy a place in which you’re going to live without wanting it so much that you might as well not even negotiate. Many—most—houses don’t speak to me with any poetry whatsoever, and so the ones that do are almost too special. Then there’s the eternal question of whether I’ll be able to afford it once I’m in. No matter how many times I go through this damnable dance, there are always nights when I lie in bed in the dark, staring toward the ceiling, turning numbers over in my head. Suddenly, I’ll remember two thousand dollars I had forgotten, and I’ll either rise in a cold sweat or I’ll doze off to sleep—depending in whose favor my addled brain had temporarily failed.

  I bought this house myself, alone, for reasons I will explain in due time. My wrangling with the Burneys took place over just a couple of days, but the tension lasted a month, from the beginning of September 1989 to the first of October. And longer, I guess, since Donna won’t talk with me. They had listed the house for $129,900. On September 1, I offered $110,000 and stipulated that they were to finish painting the house and porch and to scrape the paint drippings off the windows. I wrote in that I wanted all ceiling fans, all window air conditioners, and the fireplace screen. I asked for a response by 1:00 P.M. September 2.

  They countered to $126,500—with an increase in earnest money—and stipulated that “3 green balloon shades in MBR will not stay.” They demanded an answer by 8:00 P.M. that same day.

  I went to $117,000, agreeing to deliver the increased earnest money upon acceptance of the offer. The shades were no problem. I imposed a 10:00 P.M. deadline. I seem to recall that I went to $120,000 at one point, but I find no record of that. I also think they once called off the whole negotiation, but
I can’t be sure.

  The last counter for which I have paperwork was for $122,000. I agreed to deliver the earnest money “1 day after acceptance.” Looking back, I don’t know if that was just balm to ease the bruise of giving in, or because the day of deadline was a Sunday. With that final offer, I also listed another requirement on their part—besides the normal termite contract, I specified “a satisfactory structural report to be included.” My agent had known about the Landers episode and thus suggested this move. The Burneys had to respond by 7:00 P.M. September 3.

  I don’t know what I would’ve done if they hadn’t taken the offer. A buyer was looming for my house in west Little Rock, the house I owned with my now ex-wife back in Chicago and which I had been trying to sell for a solid year. I didn’t want to lose that sale—even if it was for the same amount we had paid three years before.

  But more than that, I needed that sale to end one chapter of my life and this one to begin another.

  Jack and Donna accepted. And then the really unpleasant part began. They had more stuff crammed into one house than any couple I had ever seen (until we started unloading our blended histories). My west Little Rock buyers wanted to be in by October 1 at the latest, which meant I had to have the Burneys gone a day or so before that. Playing both ends against the middle, I eventually worked out a grueling closing date of September 28 for both houses, with possession for both on September 29. For three and a half weeks that month, in four dwellings in Little Rock, four groups packed boxes. At the head of the chain, the Burneys, I feel certain, cursed us all.

  Before the closing took place, we discovered that the floor beneath our downstairs bathroom was rotten and would have to be replaced. I frankly don’t remember paying much attention to any of this, which is sobering to me now, having just spent a year observing how blinding a house’s charms can be—and to what devastating effect. Fortunately, I had a tough Realtor, Georgia Sells, on my side. The Burneys wanted to pass us the standard Adams letter, with its exclusions. Georgia recommended that I not accept that. We refused to close, and held off a day. In the end, the Burneys had to pay a different pest control company, Terminix, to repair the damage underneath, and a floor man to repair the inside. The Burneys escrowed $1,981 for Terminix, and $1,519 for the inside floor work. And I received a letter of clearance. Georgia says that deal reflects the new covenant between buyer and seller, an understanding that’s become more prevalent over the past five years. “It used to be ‘Buyer beware,’” she says. “Now it’s ‘Seller beware.’”

  The painters arrived a day after we moved in. For the first couple of weeks, our furniture stood in a pile in the center of the living and dining room, covered by a drop cloth. The workmen sanded and spackled and primed and painted, while Beth and I planned a wedding and I wrote a magazine article. At night, after the girls had finally gone to bed, we would walk around the house with drinks in hand, moving boxes to make paths, and we would marvel at the transformation that was taking place. Gradually, the green Burney rooms receded into the house’s history, and the colors Beth and I chose together went on the walls for all to see.

  We married on a Saturday the third week of October. Two days before that, the men came to fix the bathroom floor. On the same day, Brent flew in from New York, and my sons, David and Matt, came from their home in Connecticut. David brought his girlfriend. My mother arrived from Mississippi. That night, we had a festive dinner, the first in our dining room. I was nervous—another beginning—but toasts and speeches were called for. Beth, who once considered following in her family line of lawyers, does these things better. I presented Blair and Bret rings with their birthstones, and Beth gave David and Matt sterling key rings. On each one, she had attached a key to 501 Holly.

  Our wedding took place downtown, in a wonderfully ornate vintage building where Beth and I had gone to dances. All four of our children took part in the ceremony. Afterward, there was a party back at our new old house. Our friends were impressed, we could tell. I had the lights just right to cast a glow off the terra-cotta walls. There were no cardboard boxes in sight. Instead, the living room sparkled with the matching blue leather recamiers, the black lacquer bar, the Biedermeier mirror, the fifties lamp and forties table, the deep red Sarouk rug. The dining room chairs ringed that room as guests served themselves from a buffet adorning the old claw-andball table, which stood atop a blue Chinese rug older even than this house itself.

  Our friends filled their plates and wandered through our rooms. They pushed open the French doors from the living room to my office and stood in clusters, nibbling and sipping, studying the Arts and Crafts desk and the old lawyer’s bookcase and the European sofa and the frayed Oriental rugs and the fifties table and especially the then-revolutionary fax machine, which, from the moment I had heard about it, I had seen as a sign from God that, yes, I could live anywhere—even here and still be plugged into the world. Guests drifted onward into the bedroom, murmuring about the black lacquer bed and the bird’s-eye maple dressing table and the thirties rattan chairs. And then they followed the inevitable path into the Geranium Room, shocking in its audacity.

  We danced some that night—pushed back the furniture the way Charlie and Jessie Armour had done so many decades before, when this house was unscathed, though we knew nothing of the Armours then and, in fact, wouldn’t have paid them much mind if we had. They were the past, and our dance was all about the future. We shimmied and shook, and then, as the guests dwindled and our day slipped away, we swayed to Sinatra singing “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

  The next morning early, I heard, even through my champagne stupor, a steady creaking on the stairs. It was just light outside. I had no idea who was up. My sons and mother and stepdaughters were sleeping upstairs, and maybe Beth’s mother, too. Whoever it was, I heard him thumping into furniture on the other side of the wall, and then total silence. I got up and put on my robe. In the living room, I found Blair sitting on one of the recamiers in her pajamas, and she was glaring out the window at the hazy gray light. Her arms were folded tightly across her body. I went over to her, the concerned stepdad, and sat down in a chair next to her. She didn’t even look at me.

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  Even today, I remember the way she looked at me, which was with hatred, and the way she spoke, which was a hiss. “What’s the matter?” I said again.

  She turned my way. “I should have never let you marry my mother.”

  * * *

  We lived our first years in this house electrified by undercurrents. One was the sputtering connection of old failed marriages. Another was jealousy. Still another was the total shutdown power of grief.

  Divorce doesn’t make the search for home any easier. It makes it possible sometimes, but never easier. The common term for families who’ve been visited by divorce is broken homes. It’s an apt description. Divorce, once experienced, can infect the next house, and the next, and the next after that. It can undermine foundations, weaken roofs, compromise the sanctity of the walls themselves. Once you know, it’s hard to forget. If you know twice, it’s almost impossible.

  Beth and I have been married for six years now, and we’re still working on blending, blending, blending. Blair and Bret, naturally, being children, have played the usual cards— “I hate Jim. I want to live with Dad”—and by now I think we’ve gotten past most, though not all, of that. For the first couple of years, when Blair would sulk and say she was “mad” at me, I would smile and say, “So what else is new?” It became a running joke between us, and eventually her anger—at least her anger toward me—seemed to dissipate.

  But it’s not just those who are children, chronologically, who get caught up in the insidious power of past divorce. What happens is this: After you’ve been burned, you tend to guard against being burned the next time. The problem is, with your guard so high, you can’t see that you’re almost guaranteeing a repeat of the thing you dread most.

  I had no sense of any of this until my firs
t wife called me at work one Minnesota winter day and said she wanted to meet me for a drink. Over a cocktail table, she told me that after eleven years she was unhappy and wanted a divorce. There was no one else, she said. I’d been able to shut away the alien socks, but I couldn’t deny this. I had no idea at the time how profoundly divorce would affect me. I was the last person in the world I ever expected to be divorced. It went against all I’d grown up knowing. Even though we had moved a lot, we were always together. Always a family. I was old—thirty-two—to be learning this, but learn it I did: There’s no such thing as security. There’s no such thing as permanence. You can know it in your head, but until you’ve experienced it, you don’t know it at all.

  Jim, Blair, and Bret celebrating Snapp's third birthday, December 1994.

  We agreed to stay together for six more months, until David finished first grade. Somewhere, deep in a trunk in the darkest corner of our attic, there’s a notebook in which I kept a journal of those excruciating months in that house in Minnesota. It’s been twenty years, and I still don’t want to look at it. I do remember thinking that time had stopped. We could no longer plan together, so we floated through the days and nights, untethered to anything—to the past we were giving up, to the future we no longer had in common. We just treaded water. At least that’s what I did.

  Then on the weekend of David’s seventh birthday, two moving vans came. Hers arrived first, and when they were finished, I said good-bye to my wife and my boys and they drove off, bound for Miami. All of us were trying to be brave through our tears, except for Matt, who was eight months old and didn’t understand a thing. He laughed the whole time.

  When my van was loaded, I took one more walk through the house, through David’s red-white-and-blue room, through Matt’s yellow-green garden of a nursery, through the icy blue living and dining rooms that now showed nail holes. When I was ready, I locked the door and slid the key through the mail slot. Then I got into my car and went to meet the movers at my new apartment. Three months later I got the letter from my ex-wife telling me she had remarried.